Brain Awareness Day

The Institute of Psychiatry (IoP) with the support of the Maudsley Charity hosted a Brain Awareness day at the Maudsley research and learning center in Camberwell today. 

The day was made up of a number of activities and stations where you could learn something new about an area of psychiatry or try out new and developing technologies such as racing these toy cars using only the brain power. It was a surreal experience and did vividly remind me a scene in the Matrix (when Neo bends a spoon using only the faux concept of reality), the technology is however nothing to do with the concept of reality but concentration, balancing stress, excitement, motion and relaxation. The experience is altogether immensely satisfying and frustratingly hard to control.

In addition I met a psychiatry student who explained the theory of neuroregeneration to me, where previously I had believed nerve cells couldn't replicate via mitosis I discovered that new neurons can in fact be formed throughout your lifetime, the recipe for the fastest formation of neurons includes exercise, social engagement and a diet high in dark chocolate and blueberries!

-Izzie 

How to Make a Human -Alice Roberts

National Darwin day is an event held every year on the 12th of February globally, celebrating Darwin's birth on the same day in 1809. In central London Richard Dawkins chaired an event where Alice Roberts took on a packed lecture hall of 1,000 to talk about embryology and evolutionary biology; the lecture orientated mainly around the developing embryo and historic nature of the Epigenis theory.

 

Professor Roberts took on this complex and controversial topic with amazing grace and made the subject accessible to everyone in the lecture hall, the majority of whom had no higher education in biology. She gave a brief overview of the history of how our knowledge of embryo development came about and then talked about how an embryo is made. A particularly interesting point came up when she enlightened the audience with the fact that our ears evolved from ancient fish gills and how at early stages in our development they could differentiate into just that (if we were going to be a fish of course).

Roberts also discussed the ethical morality of killing an embryo and whether she thought that it could be viewed as a living thing and why it is important to continually question this.

She proposed the argument -do we save a baby or a dish of 4 week old embryos from a burning building, given the choice? This makes us truly question whether we view an embryo as a human life.

Alice Roberts talk was really very thought provoking and it made me question my own opinion as to whether abortion of an embryo is ethical- I now doubt whether abortion is ethically just. I can say I'm proud to have two X chromosomes in common with such a fantastic biologist.

-Izzie